Ronnie Littlejohn (Chinese: 张仁宁; pinyin: zhāng rénníng) is a comparative philosopher whose interest and publications are in areas including the following: philosophy of language, moral ethology, comparative moral grammars and ontologies, and the practice of Chinese popular religion and the lineages of Daoism. He is Chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Director of Asian Studies at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. In the 1990s, Littlejohn produced a number of articles and scholarly presentations on comparative moral grammars, including his highly original and controversial paper "Of Wheels and Webs: Mapping the Interrelationships of Moral Concepts." His approach to comparative ethics attracted the attention of Martha Nussbaum and became one of the featured methodologies in her 1997 work, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. In 2000, the Institute of East Asian Studies at University of California, Berkeley, published his "Comparative Moral Grammars," in its volume Japan's Transition to the 21st Century, edited by Sidney De Vere Brown. Then the Council on the Study of Religion commissioned him to write on his approach to teaching moral structure and practice comparatively and published his "Comparative Moral Philosophy: Learning Ethics Through Other Cultures," in its 2001 Bulletin.Littlejohn's work as a moral philosopher led him into issues of moral ethology and gave rise to a collegial relationship with the noted Dutch primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal, who is Director of the Yerkes National Primate Center of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Littlejohn's teaching and writing on moral ethology have been dramatically influenced by de Waal's work.Littlejohn is known for his development of the method he calls "philosophical fieldwork." Beginning in 1999, he went to China with the intention of looking at what material culture and contemporary practice of philosophical traditions, especially Chinese Daoism, could contribute to an understanding of philosophical texts. From 1999-2003, he worked to cultivate ties with three different lineages of Daoist practitioners of the Zhengyi (Celestial Masters) tradition in P.R. China. His first project focused on what temple iconography and ritual practice could tell one about moral prioritization in Daoism and Buddhism. Two publications form an introduction to his findings, "Is there Forgiveness in the Ghost World? Daoist and Christian Views on the Moral Order," in Ching Feng and "Taishan' s Tradition: The Quantification and Prioritization of Moral Wrongs in a Contemporary Daoist Religion," written with his research associate, Erin M. Cline for Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. His field work from 1999 to 2007 in China moved him away from prevailing interpretations of Daoism as a tradition having a philosophical trunk embodied principally in the two classical texts Daodejing and Zhuangzi, and a religious trunk that developed much later and was filled with superstitious beliefs and popular religious practices represented by the massive Daozang (Daoist Canon) of over 5,000 texts. Littlejohn insists that the earliest classical forms of Daoism that came to find their way into the Daodejing and Zhuangzi are traceable to masters who knew no division between philosophy and religion as this is thought of in the West and indeed practiced Daoism and taught beliefs that were later associated with religious movements and writings in Daoism. He was been commissioned by I.B. Tauris, London to write introductions to Daoism (completed in 2009) and Confucianism (forthcoming in 2010), and he is also writing a critical commentary to the Zhuangzi.In addition to Littlejohn's fieldwork, his training in textual and literary critical methods continues to influence his work on Chinese texts as is most evident in his critical literary study "The Liezi's Use of the Zhuangzi" and his proposals for the revision of the scholarly understanding of the textual structure of the Zhuangzi in his work Daoism: An Introduction. His debt to the work of the well known scholar of Chinese philosophy, Henry Rosemont, Jr. is best seen in his role as Co-editor of Rosemont's festschrift entitled Polishing the Chinese Mirror: Essays in Honor of Henry Rosemont, Jr. In 2009, he was invited to the First International Summit on Laozi and Daoism in Beijing where he presented his address on "How Daoism Can Be for the World."While many scholars of Chinese philosophy have explored the ways in which Confucianism is related to the Western Greek virtue theory of the philosophy of Aristotle, including Littlejohn's close associate and co-collaborator in several projects, P.J. Ivanhoe, Littlejohn's comparative work has given attention to the ways in which Daoism has interesting dialogical relationships with the Pre-Socratic thinkers, especially Parmenides and Empedocles. In this work, Littlejohn has been influenced by the writing of British Classical Scholar Peter Kingsley, a former Fellow of the Warburg Institute at the University of London. In his writings, Littlejohn often acknowledges his debt to two of Kingsley's works: In The Dark Places of Wisdom and Reality. In his comparative philosophical work he makes use of Kingsley's arguments that Parmenides and Empedocles, usually seen as rational or [scientific]] enterprises, were in fact expressions of a mystical tradition that testified to direct experience of ultimacy that yielded cognitive gain in science, healing, and art, as well as moral empowerment and discernment.